Showcase: Artificial Contender™ in the development of SONY's This Is Football

The Artificial Contender™ agent for This is Football 2005 was developed by Trusoft Int'l Inc. for the London studio of SONY Computer Entertainment Europe. SONY currently has exclusive rights on usage of Artificial Contender™ technology in video soccer games.

During the game development SONY designers played the game just as the end-user would and Artificial Contender™ learned different styles of play. No coding was involved at the training stage: the AC agents learned from being "played". Artificial Contender™ allows training of an unlimited number of soccer teams, each with distinct playing styles and behaviors. Usually, it takes as little as 30 minutes of a designer’s time to train a fully-capable AC agent. What is even more important, elements of the learned style in action become apparent after just a few minutes of training. As a result, the AC agent for This Is Football successfully plays in a similar style to the original human "trainer" and demonstrates an equal level of skill.

AC Game Recording Viewer for Soccer tool screen shot

The trainer directly controls the behavior of a player with the ball, teaching "him" how to: